Creating the New Earth Together

Posts tagged ‘Cataclysms’

Earthlings saw angels doing battle in the heavens and archangels slaying dragons. They saw Lucifer, the Morning Star, cut down from on high; they even saw witches flying on broomsticks — the stuff of legends, folklore, and religious beliefs. They prophesied the end of the world and made human sacrifices to placate the gods and stave off the destruction of the world. Such was the climate for hundreds of years during cataclysmic events Immanuel Velikovsky writes about in his heavily documented Worlds in Collision — from which I will share a few more excerpts.

Lucifer Cut Down

It can be said that the planet Mars saved the terrestrial globe from a major catastrophe by colliding with Venus. Since the days of Exodus and Joshua, Venus was dreaded by the peoples of the earth.

For about seven hundred years this terror hung over mankind like the sword of Damocles. Human sacrifices were made to Venus in both hemispheres in order to propitiate her. After centuries of terror, one sword of Damocles was removed from above the heads of mankind, only to be replaced by another. Mars became the dread of the peoples, and its return was feared every fifteen years. Before this, Mars had absorbed the blow, even the repeated blows of Venus, and had saved the earth.

Venus, which collided with the earth in the fifteenth century before the present era, collided with Mars in the eighth century. At that time Venus was moving at a lower elliptical velocity than when it first encountered the earth; but Mars, being only about one­-eighth the mass of Venus, was no match for her. It was therefore a notable achievement that Mars, though thrown out of the ring, never­theless was instrumental in bringing Venus from an elliptical to a nearly circular orbit. Looked at from the earth, Venus was removed from a path that ran high to the zenith and over the zenith to its present path in which it never retreats from the sun more than 48 degrees, thus becoming a morning or an evening star that precedes the rising sun or follows the setting sun. The awe of the world for many centuries, Venus became a tame planet.

Isaiah, referring figuratively to the king of Bbylon who destroyed cities and made the land into a wilderness, uttered his remarkable words about Lucifer that fell from heaven and was cut down to the ground. The commentators recognized that behind these words applied to the king of Babylon must have been some legend about the Morning Star. The metaphor regarding the king of Babylon implied that his fate and the fate of the Morning Star were not dissimilar; both of them fell from on high. But what could it mean that the Morning Star fell from the heights? asked the commentators.

Significant are the words of Isaiah about the Morning Star, that it “weakened the nations” before it was cut down to the ground. It weakened the nations in two collisions with the earth, and it weakened the nations by keeping them in constant fear for centuries.

The Book of Isaiah, in every chapter, provides abundant evidence that with the removal of Venus, so that it no longer crossed the orbit of the earth, danger was not eliminated, but became even more threatening. . . .

Meteorites fell from the sky as stones. One of those stones is the “black stone of Kaaba” venerated as the holiest thing in Mecca which pilgrims come from afar to kiss. According to Moslem tradition, it fell from the planet Venus, although another legend says that Archangel Gabriel brought it down.

Kaaba is older than Mohammedanism. Mohammed, in the early part of his career, worshiped Venus (al- Uzza) and other planetary gods, which even today enjoy great veneration among the Moslems as the “daughters of the god.”

Who, then, is this Archangel Gabriel?

The Archangels

In the Scriptures the destruction of the army of Sennacherib is said to have been caused by a “blast,” and a few verses later it is said to have been the act of an angel of God.” The Talmudic and Midrashic sources, which relate that the army of Sennacherib was destroyed by a blast and scourge accompanied by a terrible din on the night following the day when the shadow of the sun returned ten degrees, are more specific: the scourge was inflicted by the Archangel Gabriel “in the guise of a column of fire.” In the present research it has been established that it was the work of Mars.

Are archangels planets? “An old tradition, dating back to Gaonic times, had it that there are seven archangels, each of whom is associated with a planet.” “The seven archangels were believed to play an important part in the universal order through their association with the planets and the constellations. There is some variation, in the different versions, in the angels assigned to the planets.” In some medieval writings Gabriel is associated with the moon, but in one or two with Mars.”

The following, however, makes the identification of Gabriel possible: Gabriel is connected with the foundation of Rome. The Jewish legend says that when Solomon took the daughter of Pharaoh to wife, “the Archangel Gabriel descended from heaven and inserted a reed in the sea. About this reed more and more earth was gradually deposited, and, on the day on which Jeroboam erected the golden calves, a little hut was built on the island. This was the first dwelling-place of Rome.” Here Gabriel is cast in the role the Romans ascribed to Mars, that of the founder of Rome?* Our assumption that it was the planet Mars which caused the destruction of the army of Sennacherib in the spring of -687 is implied also by rabbinic sources: Since the Archangel Gabriel is another name for the planet Mars, the ancient Jews knew the origin of the “blast” and the identity of “the angel of the Lord” who destroyed the Assyrian army.

*It was Aeneas who founded the city of Rome in the eighth century before the present era after he was saved when Troy was captured and went to Carthage and from there to Italy.

Gabriel is the angel appointed over fire; he is also, according to Origen,” the angel of war. Thus we again recognize in him Mars Nergal. The rabbinical tradition says that the Assyrians of the host of Sennacherib, before they died, were permitted by Gabriel to hear “the song of the celestials,” which can be interpreted as the sound caused by a close approach of the planet. The words of Isaiah (33 : 3) “at the noise of the tumult [hamon] the people fled,” should, according to the Jewish tradition as related by Jerome, refer to Gabriel, Hamon being another of his names.”

The planet Mars is red, and Maadim (the red or the one who redens) is the name for Mars in the Hebrew astronomical texts. On­e text says: “The Holy One created Mars–Maadim–that he should throw them [the nations] down into hell.”

A few rabbinical sources attribute the destruction of Sennacherib’s army to the action of the Archangel Michael; some ascribe it to both archangels.

Who, then, is the Archangel Michael?

The entire story of Exodus is connected with the Archangel Michael. In Exodus 14 : 19 the pillar of fire and of cloud is called Angel of God. According to the Midrash it was the Archangel Michael who made himself “a wall of fire” between the Israelites and the Egyptians. Michael is said to be made of fire. The Haggadah states: “Michael was appointed High Priest of the celestial sanctuary at the same time that Aaron was made high priest of Israel,” that is, in the time of the Exodus. Michael was also the angel who appeared to Joshua, son of Nun.

The celestial struggle at the Sea of Passage is depicted in the familiar image of the Archangel Michael slaying the dragon. Michael produces fire by touching the earth, and it was the emanation of this archangel that was seen in the burning bush, He has his abode in heaven and is the forerunner of Shehina [Shekinah] or God’s presence, but as Lucifer, Michael falls from heaven and his hands are bound by God. All these attributes and acts of the Archangel Michae lead us to recognize which planet he represents: it is Venus.

The Archangel Michael, or the planet Venus, and the Archangel Gabriel, or the planet Mars, saved the people of Israel on two dramatic occasions. At the Sea of Passage, when the hosts of Egypt, pursuing the fleeing slaves, could be seen in the distance (“the chil­dren of Israel lifted up their eyes, and, behold, the Egyptians marched after them; and they were sore afraid,” the sea was torn apart, and the slaves walked on the bottom of the sea and reached the other shore. Their enemies were thrown high by the released tides, which fell down when a spark passed between Venus and the earth.

Eight hundred years passed after the Exodus. The Assyrian hosts, which a generation earlier had removed the Ten Tribes of Israel to an exile from whence they never returned, invaded Judea with the express purpose of crushing rebellious Judah and removing him from his homeland and from the scene of history. A blast from the planet Mars fell upon the camp of the Assyrians and annihilated it. Those rabbinical sources which ascribed this act to both archangels were not wrong. Venus pushed Mars toward the earth, and thus both were instrumental in the destruction.

The author of the apocryphal book of the Ascension [Assumption] of Moses knew that “Venus and Mars are each as large as the whole Earth.”

Because of their intervention at moments when the national existence of Israel was at stake, Michael and Gabriel were looked upon as “guardian angels” of the eternal people.

Gabriel is the Hebrew Hercules (Heracles). Actually the classic authors made it clear that Hercules is another name for the planet Mars. In the Gospel of Luke (1:26) Gabriel is the angel of Annunciation to the Virgin.

In the Roman Catholic Church Michael is the conqueror of Satan, “head of the host of heaven and first of the saints after Mary.

Planet Worship in Judea in the Seventh Century

In the Northern Kingdom the process of disassociating the deity from the celestial object had not yet been completed when the Kingdom was destroyed (-723 or -722), and its population was led away into captivity, from which they did not return. “And they [the tribe of the Northern Kingdom] left all the commandments of the Lord their God, and made them molten images, even two calves, and made a grove, and worshiped all the host of heaven and served Baal” (II Kings 17: 16).

Only a few years after the deliverance of Judea from the hand of Sennacherib, Manasseh, son of Hezekiah, ”built altars for all the host of heaven in the two courts of the house of the Lord” (II King, 21: 5). “For he [Manasseh] built again high places which Hezekiah his father had broken down, and he reared up altars for Baalim, and he made groves, and worshipped all the host of heaven, and served them” (II Chronicles 33 : 3).

“Baalim” or “Baal” are shorter versions of Beelzebub (Baal Zevuv), names given to Venus when she was a comet. This sheds an historical light on the story of Elijah and his contest between the worshipers of Baal and those who worshiped the Lord God. Then there’s this legend behind our Halloween witches on broomsticks:

The Pageants of the Sky

Cosmic perturbations took place, catastrophes swept the globe, but did witches fly through the air on brooms? The reader would agree that cosmic catastrophes, if they occurred, could leave, and must have left, similar memories all around the world; but there are fantastic images that do not appear to represent realities. We shall follow this rule: if there exists a fantastic image that is projected against the sky and that repeats itself all around the world, it is most probably an image that was seen on the screen of the sky by many peoples at the same time. On one occasion a comet took the striking form of a woman riding on a broom, and the celestial picture was so clearly defined that the same impression was imposed on all the peoples of the world. It is well known how, in modern times, the forms of comets impress people.

Besides being a source for creative imaging (pareidolia), folklore, and religious beliefs, cataclysmic upheavals of the past tell us that we live in a world that is far from stable and that has its own cycles and seasons of evolution which impact our planet’s climate and weather far more than anything we humans could possibly do. I will continue sharing Velikovsky with you in the next post. Until then,

Catastrophic events have always been perceived by the inhabitants of the Earth as punishment by the gods for their sinful and ungodly behavior – or, as one native tribe believed, for turning away from the Great Spirit. It hasn’t entered our guilt-laden consciousness that it is we, not the gods, who have brought the sky down upon our own heads, literally, by our failure to play our spiritual role as a vital cog in the Wheel of Life; our failure to remember that what we do here vibrationally impacts the entire solar system. The problem is compacted by the fact that we’ve forgotten our bloody and painful past, blotted it out of memory altogether, while tottering on the brink of repeating it. These blog posts are being written as a reminder of what has gone before — not millions of years ago, but in our own recent historical past.

Immanuel Velikovsky has reminded us of that cataclysmic past in his trilogy, Worlds in Collision, Earth in Upheaval and Ages in Chaos. I bring him forward now in a timely manner because the decisive hour of this civilization’s survival or utter collapse is at hand, and it doesn’t appear likely we are going to repent of our self-centered destructive ways soon enough to avert a man-made global catastrophe. Twice in our historical past our species has been blown to kingdom come and all but annihilated from the face of the earth. A third time would be our last. Just as in America’s favorite sport, three strikes and you’re out. What we need is a Home run.

Here are a few excerpts from Worlds in Collision, describing in graphic details what our species underwent during global cataclysms that took place five-thousand and twenty-seven hundred years ago – in the fifth century before the present era in the days of Noah when Atlantis sank into the ocean and in the eighth century before the present era when Moses led the Jewish Nation out of Egyptian captivity. These excerpts relate to the period following the latter of theses two events when the once-comet Venus, after wreaking havoc on planet Earth, was captured by our solar system after an encounter with Mars which pushed her into a stable orbit around the sun and added her to our planetary system — all of this the end conclusion of Velikovsk’s exhaustive research into the cataclysmic history of our planet.

The Year was -747

Velikovsky

ABOUT seven hundred fifty years passed after the great catastrophe of the days of the Exodus, or seven centuries after the cosmic disturbance in the days of Joshua. During all this time the world was afraid of the recurrence of the catastrophe at the end of every jubilee period. Then, starting about the middle of the eighth century before the present era, a new series of cosmic upheavals took place at intervals of short duration.

It was the time of the Hebrew prophets whose books are preserved in writing, of Assyrian kings whose annals are excavated and deciphered, and of Egyptian pharaohs of the Libyan and Ethiopian dynasties; in short, the catastrophes which we are now about to describe did not take place in a mist-shrouded past: the period is part of the well authenticated history of the lands of the eastern Mediterranean. The eighth century also saw the beginning of the nations of Greece and Rome.

The seers who prophesied in Judea were versed in the lore of heavenly motion; they observed the ways of the planetary and cometary bodies and, like the stargazers of Assyria and Babylonia, they were aware of future changes.

In the eighth century, in the days of Uzziah, king of Jerusalem, there occurred a devastating catastrophe called raash or “commotion.” Amos, who lived at the time of Uzziah, began to predict a cosmic upheaval before the raash took place, and after the catastrophe Isaiah, Joel, Hosea, and Micah insisted unanimously and with great emphasis on the inevitability of another encounter of the earth with some cosmic body.

The prophecy of Amos was made two years before the raash (1:1). He declared that fire sent by the Lord would devour Syria, Edom, Moab, Ammon, and Philistia, as well as the far-off countries, “with a tempest in the day of the whirlwind” (1: 14). The land of Israel would not be exempted; “great tumult” would be on its mountains, and “great houses shall have an end” (3: 15). “He will smite the great house with breaches, and the little house with clefts” (6: 11). . . .

Amos, the earliest among the prophets of Judah and Israel whose speeches are preserved in writing,” reveals the concept of Yahweh in that remote period of history. Yahweh orders the planets. “He who maketh [ordains] Khima and Khesil,” and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night, and calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth, the Lord [Yahweh] is his name: He strengtheneth the spoiled against the strong” (5: 8-9).

Amos prophesied: The land “shall rise up wholly as a Rood; and it shall be cast out and drowned, as by the flood of Egypt. And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord God, that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day” (8: 8-9). The “flood of Egypt” mentioned by Amos may be a reference to the catastrophe of the day of the Passage of the Sea; but more probably it refers to an event within the memory of the generation to which Amos spoke.

In the reign of Osorkon II of the Libyan Dynasty in Egypt, in the third year, the first month of the second season, on the twelfth day, according to a damaged inscription,” the flood came on, in this whole land . . . this land was in its power like the sea; there was no dyke of the people to withstand its fury. All the people were like birds upon it . . . the tempest . . . suspended . . . like the heavens. All the temples of Thebes were like marshes.” . . .

On the day of the approaching catastrophe, Amos says, there will be no place of escape, not even on Mount Carmel, rich in caves. “Though they climb up to heaven, thence will I bring them down. And though they hide themselves in the top of Carmel, I will search and take them out thence” (9: 2-3).

Earth will melt and the sea will be heaped up and thrown upon inhabited land. “And the Lord God of hosts is he that toucheth the land, and it shall melt. . . . He that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth” (9: 5-6).

Amos was persecuted and killed. The catastrophe did not fail to come at the appointed time. In anticipation and in fear of it, King Uzzlah went to the Temple to burn incense.” The priests opposed his appropriating their functions. “Suddenly the earth started to quake so violently that a great breach was torn in the Temple. On the west side of Jerusalem, half of a mountain was split off and hurled to the east.” Flaming seraphim leaped in the air.”. .

The Year -747

If the commotion of the days of Uzziah was of global character and was brought about by an extraterrestrial agent, it must have caused some disturbance in the motion of the earth on its axis and along its orbit. Such a disturbance would have made the old calendar obsolete and would have required the introduction of a new calendar.

In -747 a new calendar was introduced in the Middle East, and that year is known as “the beginning of the era of Nabonassar.” It is asserted that some astronomical event gave birth to this new calendar, but the nature of the event is not known. The beginning of the era of Nabonassar, otherwise an obscure Babylonian king, was an astronomical date used as late as the second Christian century by the great mathematician and astronomer of the Alexandrian school, Ptolemy, and also by other scholars. It was employed as a point of departure of ancient astronomical tables.

A Blast from Heaven Kills 185,000 Warriors

The destruction of the army of Sennacherib is described laconically in the Book of Kings: “And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the Lord went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians a hun­dred fourscore and five thousand; and when the people arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses. So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed, and went and returned, and dwelt in Nineveh.” It is Similarly described in the Book of Chronicles: “And the prophet Isaiah, the son of Amoz, prayed and cried to heaven. And the Lord sent an angel which cut off all the mighty men of valor, and the leaders and captains in the camp of the king of Assyria. So he [Sennacherib] returned with shame of face to his own land.

What kind of destruction was this? Malach, translated as “angel,” means in Hebrew “one who is sent to execute an order,” supposed to be an order of the Lord. It is explained in the texts of the Books of Kings and Isaiah that it was a “blast” sent upon the army of Sennacherib.! “I will send a blast upon him … and [he] shall return to his own land,” was the prophecy immediately preceding the catastrophe. . . . The Talmud and Midrash sources, which are numerous, all agree on the manner in which the Assyrian host was destroyed: a blast fell from the sky on the camp of Sennacherib. It was not a flame, but a consuming blast: “Their souls were burnt, though their garments remained intact.” The phenomenon was accompanied by a terrific noise.”

“Yahu!”

Here is a story, told to Shelton by the Snohomish tribe on Puget Sound, about the origin of the exclamation “Yahu,” to which I have already referred briefly. “A long time ago, when all the animals were still human beings, the sky was very low. It was so low that the people could not stand erect. . . . They called a meeting together and discussed how they could raise the sky. But they were at a loss to know how to do so. No one was strong enough to lift the sky. Finally the idea occurred to them that possibly the sky might be moved by the combined efforts of the people, if all of them pushed against it at the same time. But then the question arose of how it would be possible to make all the people exert their efforts at exactly the same moment. For the different peoples would be far away from one another, some would be in this part of the world, others in an­other part. What signal could be given that all people would lift at precisely the same time? Finally, the word ‘Yahu!’ was invented for this purpose. It was decided that all the people should shout ‘Yahu!’ together, and then exert their whole strength in lifting the sky. In accordance with this, the people equipped themselves with poles, braced them against the sky, and then all shouted ‘Yahu!’ in unison. Under their combined efforts the sky rose a little. Again the people shouted ‘Yahu!’ and lifted the heavy weight. They repeated this until the sky was sufficiently high.” Shelton says that the word “Yahu” is used today when some heavy object like a large canoe is being lifted.

It is easy to recognize the origin of this legend. Clouds of dust and gases enveloped the earth for a long time; it seemed that the sky had descended low. The earth groaned repeatedly because of the severe twisting and dislocation it had experienced. Only slowly and gradu­ally did the clouds lift themselves from the ground.

One can only imagine what horror human beings experienced in those days. I will share more of Velikovsky in my next post.

Venus: The Morning Star/Mazzaroth/Lucifer/Satan/Baal/Beelzebub

We inhabit a planet that has undergone radical and traumatic change in the past, and we are in the danger zone chronologically for a revisit of comet debris from outer space. Things have not always been as quiet and stable on Earth as they appear now. In our historical past, for example, Venus was once a comet that legends tell horrific stories about. All of the names listed in the caption above are names by which the once-comet-now-planet Venus, thought to be born out of Jupiter, was called.

The story – as told in ancient legends and retold by Immanuel Velikovsky in his 1950 heavily documented masterpiece of exhaustive research Worlds In Collision – tells of swarms of flies and other insects that plagued, not only the Egyptians in the story of the Exodus, but peoples everywhere on the planet in the wake of comet Venus’ tail as it passed so close to the earth that it scorched its surface and wreaked havoc to the planet. Venus was thus dubbed “Beelzebub, Lord of the flies” for this reason.

When Venus sprang out of Jupiter as a comet and flew very close to the earth, it became entangled in the embrace of the earth. The internal heat developed by the earth and the scorching gases of the comet were in themselves sufficient to make the vermin of the earth propagate at a very feverish rate. Some of the plagues, like the plague of the frogs (“the land brought forth frogs”) or of the locusts, must be ascribed to such causes. Anyone who has experienced a khamsin (sirocco), an electrically charged wind blowing from the desert, knows how, during the few days that the wind blows, the ground around the villages begins to teem with vermin.

The question arises here whether or not the comet Venus infested the earth with vermin which it may have carried in its trailing atmos­phere in the form of larvae together with stones and gases. It is significant that all around the world peoples have associated the planet Venus with flies. . . .

Modem biologists toy with the idea that microorganisms arrive on the earth from interstellar spaces, carried by the pressure of light. Hence, the idea of the arrival of living organisms from interplanetary spaces is not new. Whether there is truth in this supposition of larval contamination of the earth is anyone’s guess. The ability of many small insects and their larvae to endure great cold and heat and to live in an atmosphere devoid of oxygen renders not entirely im­probable the hypothesis that Venus (and also Jupiter, from which Venus sprang) may be populated by vermin.

Baal Zevuv (Beelzebub)

The beautiful Morning Star was related to Ahriman, Seth, Lucifer, name equivalents of Satan. It was also Baal of the Canaanites and of the Northern Kingdom of the Ten Tribes, the god hated by the biblical prophets, also Beelzebub or Baal Zevuv, or Baal of the fly.

In the Pahlavi text of the Iranian book, the Bundahis, describing the catastrophes caused by celestial bodies, it is written that at the close of one of the world ages “the evil spirit [Ahriman] went toward the luminaries.” “He stood upon one-third of the inside of the sky, and he sprang, like a snake, out of the sky down to the earth.” It was the day of the vernal equinox. “He rushed in at noon,” and “the sky was shattered and frightened.” “Like a fly, he rushed out upon the whole creation, and he injured the world and made it dark at midday as though it were in dark night. And noxious creatures were diffused by him over the earth, biting and venomous, such as the snake, scorpion, frog, and lizard, so that not so much as the point of a needle remained free from noxious creatures.”

Then the Bundahis proceeds: “The planets, with many demons [comets], dashed against the celestial sphere, and they mixed the constellations; and the whole creation was as disfigured as though fire disfigured every place and smoke arose over it.”

A similar plague of vermin is described in the Scriptures, in Exodus, Chapters 8 to 10, and also in Psalm 78 where it is told that there were sent “divers sorts of flies among them [the people of Egypt], which devoured them; and frogs, which destroyed them. (From Worlds In Collision)

Fear reigned in the hearts of the people

Comet Venus, which cycled back toward Earth about every fifteen years, was greatly feared by the people who had survived the first cataclysmic upheaval in the second millennium before the present era and had begun to rebuild their lives and human civilization. Venus was watched by astronomers and fearful humans across the globe for changes in its movement in the heavens. I’ll let Velikovsky tell it in his own words:

Velikovsky

“The earth and the water without which we cannot exist suddenly turned into enemies and engulfed the animal kingdom, the human race included, and there was no shelter and no refuge. In such cataclysms the land and the sea repeatedly changed places, laying dry the kingdom of the ocean and submerging the kingdoms of the land.” (Velikovsky, Earth In Upheaval)

The movements of Venus were carefully watched by the ancient astronomers of Mexico, India, Iran, and Babylonia. Temple observatories for the cult of the planets were built in both hemispheres. The bamot or “high places” so often mentioned in the Scriptures were observatories as well as places for offerings to the planet-gods, chiefly Venus (Baal). On these high places idolatrous priests, ordained by the erring kings of Judah, burned incense to Baal, to the sun and the moon, and to the planets. . . .

As long as Venus returned at regular intervals, fear of the planet was kept in bounds, when the star passed without causing harm, as it had already done for a few centuries, the people were calmed and felt themselves out of danger for another period. But when Venus, for some reason, began to move irregularly, fear grew intense.

The priests of Iran prayed:

We sacrifice to Tistrya, the bright and glorious star, for whom long flocks and herds and men, looking forward for him and deceived in their hope: When shall we see him rise up, the bright and glorious star Tistrya?

The Zend-Avesta answered for the star:

If men would worship me with a sacrifice in which I were invoked by my own name then I should come to the faithful at the appointed time.

The priests responded:

The next ten nights, 0 Spitama Zarathustra! the bright and glorious Tistrya mingles his shape with light, moving in the shape of a golden-horned bull.

They glorified the star that made “all the shores of the ocean boiling over, all the middle of it boiling over.” They heaped up sacrifices to the star, imploring it not to change its course.

We sacrifice unto Tistrya, the bright and glorious star who from the shining east moves along his long winding course, along the path made by the gods. . . .

We sacrifice unto Tistrya the bright and glorious star, whose rising is watched by the chiefs of deep understanding.

The star of Venus did not appear in the prescribed seasons. In the Book of Job the Lord asks him: “Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season …? Knowest thou the changes of heaven?” 11

11 Job 38: 32-33. The King James translation has, “Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven?” The Septuagint has “the changes of heaven.”

The Science of Mazzaroth

The ancients read the stars and governed according to the signs and seasons – the ordinances – of the heavenly bodies, their risings and their settings. That science was generally lost, only later to be replaced by what we know today as astrology, a rather distorted and poor imitation of this ancient astronomical science and art. This may be the reason, as the author indicates below, for the uncertainty of its meaning.

There exists an extensive exegetic literature on this Mazzaroth from which it can be concluded only that “the meaning of Mazzaroth is uncertain.” But the Vulgate (Latin) translation of the Bible has Lucifer for Mazzaroth. The (Greek) translation of the Seventy (Septuagint) reads: “Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season and guide the Evening Star by his long hair?” These words of the Septuagint seem very strange. I have already mentioned that the Greek word komet means “the long-haired one,” or a star with hair, a comet. In Latin, coma is “hair.”

Venus ceased to appear in its seasons. What had happened?

Venus Becomes the Morning Star

Since the latter part of the eighth century before the present era, Venus has followed an orbit between Mercury and Earth, which it has maintained ever since. It became the Morning and Evening Star. Seen from the earth, it is never removed more than 48 degrees (when at its eastern and western elongation) or three hours and a few minutes east or west of the sun. The dreaded comet became a tame planet. It has the most nearly circular orbit among the planets.

The end of the terror which Venus kept alive for eight centuries after the days of the Exodus was the inspiration for Isaiah when he said:

“How art thou fallen from heaven, 0 Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God.”

Septuagint [Greek Bible]and Vulgate [LatinBible] both translate Morning Star or Lucifer. What does it mean, that the Morning Star was assailing the heavens and rising high, and that it was cut down low to the horizon, and would weaken no more the nations?

More than a hundred generations of commentators have occupied themselves with this passage, but have met with failure.

Why, it is also asked, should the beautiful Morning Star, called Lucifer, the Light Bearer, live in the imagination of peoples as an evil power, a fallen star? What is in this lovely planet that makes her name an equivalent of Satan, or Seth of the Egyptians, the dark power? In his confusion, Origen wrote this question to the quoted verses of Isaiah: “Most evidently by these words is he shown to have fallen from heaven, who formerly was Lucifer, and who used to arise in the morning. For if, as some think, he was a nature of darkness, how is Lucifer said to have existed before? Or how could he arise in the morning, who had in himself nothing of the light?”

Lucifer was a feared prodigy in the sky, and its origin, as illuminated in this book, explains how it came to be regarded as a dark power and a fallen star.

After a great struggle, Venus achieved a circular orbit and a permanent place in the family of planets. During the perturbations which brought about this metamorphosis, Venus also lost its cometary tail.

In the valley of the Euphrates, “Venus then gives up her position as a great stellar divinity, equal with sun and moon, and joins the ranks of the other planets.”

A comet became a planet.

Venus was born as a comet in the second millennium before the present era. In the middle of that millennium it twice made contact with the earth and changed its cometary orbit. In the tenth to eighth centuries of the first millennium, it was still a comet. What caused such further changes in the motion of Venus in the first millennium that it became a planet on a circular orbit? (From Worlds In Collision)

The answer is Mars, which I will write about in my next post. Until then, here’s wishing you a Happy and Healthy New Year !

Velikovsky’s References for this excerpt :Schiaparelli, Astronomy in the Old T’estament, p. 74; Cambridge Bible, Book of Job, by A. B. Davidson and H. C. Lanchester; J.S. Suschken, Unvorgreifliche Kometen-Gedanken: Ob der Kometen in der’heiligen Schrift gedacht werde? (1744); and Isaiah 14 : 12-13); The Writings of Origen, “De principiis” (transl. F. Crombie, 1869), p. 51.; A. Jeremias, The Old Testament in the Light of the Ancient East (1911). I, 18.; Zend-Avesta (transI. Darmesteter ), Pt. II, pp. 94 ff. The belief sometimes expressed, that Tistrya is Sirius, is an obvious error: Sirius does not travel in a winding course. The star in the shape of a golden-homed bull was Venus. Also, inaccurate movements of Sirius could not occur without similar irregularity on the part of all the stars; Job 38: 32-33. The King James translation has, “Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven?” The Septuagint has “the changes of heaven.”